It’s things like this which convince me that terrorists will be unable to build any kind of serious dirty bomb or nuclear weapon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that radioactive cobalt is not used in making nukes, but we’re the most advanced nation on Earth, and we have to use all kinds of technological gizmos to play with the crap. Some terrorist operating in a basement isn’t going to have access to that kind of gear, and if he were somehow able to get hold of plutonium or uranium wouldn’t be able to handle the stuff without giving himself such a dose that he’d die before he could get the thing together. Plus, the only folks with the necessary knowledge to be able to build one, would know enough about it that they wouldn’t want to screw around with the stuff without the proper gear, so they’d tell anyone asking them to whip one up in a basement to get bent.
Even if they were able to get their hands on a stolen nuke from Russia or buy one from North Korea, they’d lack the necessary gear and/or training to be able to properly handle the thing, and it’d either fail to go off, or they’d “cook” themselves to such an extent, that they wouldn’t be able to deliver the thing. Not to mention that they’d have to know that if they were actually able to pull it off, there’s not a nation which would be willing to harbor them, since the population of the entire planet would be after them. (If for no other reason than to keep us crazy 'Merkins from blowing up everything in sight.)
Um, reminds me of a conversation I had with a worker at the South Texas Project.
He said, “If you put a load of that spent fuel onto a flatbed truck, and stood behind a really thick lead shield 100 yeards away, and jumped out and ran full speed at the flatbed, you’d never make it!”
Not sure how accurate he was, and he may have been BS’ing a newbie, but there were several other old hands around and not one of them even snickered.
FWIW, I personally don’t doubt the level of lethality of certain substances.
Thinking further on what you wrote, I’d like to add that most of the fission devices out there work off plutonium, nor uranium.
For various reasons I won’t get into here, plutonium is much more difficult to use in a fission device, but the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. However, I do doubt that terrorist forces have the know-how to build a proper explosive lens to implode the plutonium.
Uranium is a different story. As I recall, the first nuke was a uranium gun device and was not even tested before being deployed to Hiroshima. They were that sure of it. The Trinity test was of the plutonium implosion device. This was the one used on Nagasaki. (Fat Man vs. Little Boy)
So, while I do think it might be technically feasibile for terrorists to build a functioning uranium fission device (using U-235 or, possibly, U-233), the relative unavailability of this isotope would prevent such.
I don’t know about how many terrorist folk would die before properly forming the U-235 into suitable shapes, but I do suspect that the level of fatalities would be meaningless to them. I’d go with the unavailability as being the show-stopper.
Just my opinion, and if I got anything wrong, feel free to educate/correct me…IANANP (Nuclear Physicist)
Meaningless to the guys in charge, sure, meaningless to the guys actually playing with the stuff? A whole 'nother ballgame. Radiation poisoning isn’t exactly a pretty way to go, and martyrs in the Mid-East seem to prefer being blown up, to slow painful death (after all, there doesn’t seem to be any instance of them deliberately contracting a particularly nasty illness and spreading it around before dying), so I’d think if you managed to get some recruits, once some of them started falling over and puking their insides out, you’d have trouble finding replacements.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why proliferation is the main concern in the nuclear power industry. I just took a course on nuclear engineering. Safety is of course maintained, but they’ve got it to the point where your average nuclear reactor has fewer fatalities than an insurance office.
The big issue is spent fuel. That’s why it’s illegal to reprocess fuel in the USA - it means you have to move the spent fuel from the reactor to the reprocessing plant, and then from there to the plant that processes the new and old fuel into reactor-usable components, and then from there back to the plant. It adds three more opportunities for terrorists to steal the fuel every time a reactor refuels.
Nevertheless, when Carter made reprocessing illegal in the 1970s, no one else followed suit. Yet somehow the terrorists still aren’t getting their hands on the hot stuff. My guess is they’re operating under an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy. I’d say that just by using conventional explosives, they’ve managed to get the world’s attention rather well, wouldn’t you?
That’s possible, but I think that it’s far more likely they know that if they did set one off, we Yanks would be more than happy to nuke the crap out of them, and that nobody would do two squirts to stop us. I’m sure that there’d be those folks who would say the US was wrong in wanting to wage war, but the rest of the planet would no doubt be, “Oh shit, they’ve annoyed the crazy person! Round up everybody who even remotely could be a terrorist and ship 'em of to the Americans so they do whatever they want to at Gitmo, otherwise we’re liable to get nuked!”